Former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, is on fascinating, yet
typically evasive, form in Errol Morris's documentary, The Unknown Known,
says Mike McCahill

In 2003, with the Bush administration becoming entrenched in the Middle East, documentarist Errol Morris sat down with former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara and came up with The Fog of War, one of the best films ever made about the idiosyncrasies of American foreign policy.

A decade on, Morris has made a film that serves as both sequel and footnote: The Unknown Known, a genial chin-wag with Donald Rumsfeld about the thousands of memos the subject dictated over the course of his 40-year Washington career.

Rumsfeld, we’re reminded, was a Nixon protégé, and you might be tempted to interpret Morris’s film as a lesson in what US politics inherited from the Watergate era: chiefly, a dormant paranoia gene, reawakened on September 11 2001. (You’d be paranoid too, if somebody attempted to fly a commercial jetliner into your workspace.)

What’s notable is how Rumsfeld promulgates that paranoia, in language that twists around on itself, denying any and all surety. “All generalisations are false, including this one.” “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Say what?

While Morris never pushes his interviewee too hard – if Rumsfeld walks, he takes the film with him – he has at least recognised there might be a certain fascination in watching this semantics whizz talk his way around, say, any acceptance of responsibility for the treatment of Guantánamo internees.

What ends up being documented here is the verbal obfuscation that formed an essential component of this particular war’s fog – even as it allows Rumsfeld, emerging from these 100 minutes both known and yet strangely unknown, to get away with it all over again.